The American Midwest

An Interpretive Encyclopedia

Richard Sisson, Christian Zacher, and Andrew Cayton, editors

Publication Year: 2007

This first-ever encyclopedia of the Midwest seeks to embrace this large and diverse area, to give it voice, and help define its distinctive character. Organized by topic, it encourages readers to reflect upon the region as a whole. Each section moves from the general to the specific, covering broad themes in longer introductory essays, filling in the details in the shorter entries that follow. There are portraits of each of the region's twelve states, followed by entries on society and culture, community and social life, economy and technology, and public life. The book offers a wealth of information about the region's surprising ethnic diversity -- a vast array of foods, languages, styles, religions, and customs -- plus well-informed essays on the region's history, culture and values, and conflicts. A site of ideas and innovations, reforms and revivals, and social and physical extremes, the Midwest emerges as a place of great complexity, signal importance, and continual fascination.

Cover

General Contents

Reader’s Guide

The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia is
organized topically, as indicated in the general table of
contents. Each section begins with a table of contents
for the section, and further organizational explanation
is offered in the Senior Consulting Editors’ overview
essays that appear at the start...

Preface and Acknowledgments

Most Americans have an ambiguous sense of regional
identity. If asked to explain who they are, few would
think first of regionalism—an expression of imagined
identity with people who inhabit a perceived common
landscape. Ethnicity, race, gender, religion, and state,
among other things...

General Overview

“Prodesse quam conspici” (“To produce rather than to be
conspicuous”), the motto of Miami University in Oxford,
Ohio, is a fitting credo for the American Midwest
as a whole. In the popular imagination, Midwesterners
are generally considered...

Landscapes and People

Portraits of the Twelve States

The American Midwest means different things to
different people. Its shape and contours shift dramatically,
depending on where you are standing. From
Ohio, the Missouri River looks like a distant boundary
in a different kind of place. From Michigan, Minnesota,
and Wisconsin—part farm country and part
forested lake terrain, imbued...

Images of the Midwest

Place imagery appears a trivial subject at first glance.
The associations of Wisconsin with cheese and Colorado
with mountains, to take two popular examples,
are known to conceal as much as they reveal. Our educational
system rightfully teaches us to be suspicious
of such stereotypes. Imagery persists, however. It does
so for the practical reason...

Geography

As defined in this encyclopedia, the Midwest region of
the United States encompasses roughly 600,000
square miles, or about one-fifth the area of the Lower
48 states. The region is bounded by Canada and the
Great Lakes on the north, by the Great Plains...

Peoples

It is not too much to say that the broad outlines of the
history of the Midwest are subsumed within the migration
to the region and subsequent interaction of its
peoples. One could also argue that one of the most
distinguishing characteristics of the region is its ethnic
and racial heterogeneity...

Society and Culture

Language

It may surprise readers of this encyclopedia to discover
that, just as the Midwest is remarkably varied in
its physical and cultural environments, it is and has
been home also to an enormous variety of languages
and to considerable variation in its English. That last
point may seem most peculiar because midwesterners
themselves, as well as those who caricature...

Folklore

Folklore is at once a word with peculiar origins and
meanings, a complex and evolving system of traditional
artistic practices within cultural groups, and a
field of study—all of which have significance within
the American Midwest...

Literature

In 1924, the first issue of the New Yorker appeared on
newsstands with the now famous proviso that it was
“not edited for the old lady in Dubuque.” Wondering
how the new offering would play in the heartland,
Time magazine sent a copy to one of its midwestern
readers, who retorted, “The editors of the periodical
you forwarded are, I understand, members...

Arts

To consider the Midwest as a breeding ground for
creativity in the production of architecture, the visual
and decorative arts, and music, one must take into
consideration more than a summary of its constituent
parts. Probing beyond the “catalog” approach to
makers and their creative offerings...

Cultural Institutions

The words culture and midwestern are rarely linked in
American popular consciousness. Indeed, New York
has been considered the cultural capital of the United
States since the nineteenth century. Yet, to paraphrase
poet Carl Sandburg, the Midwest functions as the “big
shoulders” on which the culture of the nation rests...

Religion

The first major factor in accounting for the development
of religion in the Midwest is the region’s relatively
recent settlement by European Americans. Unlike
that of the eastern seaboard and the southwestern
states, the European presence in the Midwest during
the age of colonization...

Education

The popular image of the one-room country schoolhouse
as the embodiment of education in the Midwest
is only one dimension of a complex story. Indeed, the
characteristics of midwestern schooling are remarkably
diverse. The distinctive regional themes of education
in the Midwest have emerged from dynamic tensions
among conflicting...

Sports and Recreation

Visitors to Tommy Bartlett’s Thrill Show in the Wisconsin
Dells know they are getting something few
other places in the nation now offer. The athletic
water skiers, both male and female, dressed in
sparkling sequins and satin, dazzle audiences with
their daring flips...

Media and Entertainment

If the Midwest has a distinctive identity, it is not immediately
clear that this readily extends to the area of
Media and Entertainment. Indeed, for most people,
the idea of media and entertainment immediately conjures
up a range of individuals, texts, and artifacts that
transcend regional identity to resonate at a national,
even global, level...

Community and Social Life

Rural Life

When most people think of the Midwest, they envision
a rural landscape dotted with farm homes and
with fields of corn visible for miles. Indeed, agriculture
is central to the concept of the Midwest as a region,
and the historical dominance of small family
farms is one of its distinctive features...

Small-Town Life

Perhaps no other region in the United States is so
closely associated with the image of small-town life as
the Midwest. From the first settlement of the region
by European American farmers to the present, the
small town has played a central role in the region’s
economic and social development...

Urban and Suburban Life

The Midwest includes a diverse array of cities. From
Youngstown and Cleveland in the east to Omaha and
Wichita in the west, midwesterners inhabit cities with
distinct identities and histories. The Midwest is not a
region of cookie-cutter metropolises, each one identical
to the next. The Motor City of Detroit, the Windy
City of Chicago, the Queen City of Cincinnati...

Economy and Technology

Labor Movements and Working-class Culture

From the Civil War era until the mid-twentieth century,
the Midwest was the storm center of the American
labor movement. From the Haymarket Affair in
1886 and the Pullman Strike in 1894, to the General
Motors Sit-Down Strike of 1936–1937 and the defeats
of the Staley, Caterpillar, and newspaper workers’
strikes in the mid-1990s, midwestern...

Transportation

The history of transportation in the Midwest is varied
and complex. It is the story of men and women dealing
with time and space across a broad and varied geographical
landscape. The Midwest is a vast region that
includes forests, prairies, lakes, and rivers, all of which
have influenced the location...

Science and Technology, Health and Medicine

Although they caused difficulty for the early settlers,
the geology, climate, and topography of the Midwest
also offered opportunity, and the numerous streams,
rivers, and great lakes encouraged as well as blocked
movement. Early means of transportation were
through these bodies of water, facilitated by canals,
and then by advances in shipping...

Public Life

Constitutional and Legal Culture

The great prairie lawyer Abraham Lincoln once said
of an opposing legal counsel’s argument: “He caught
on to something, but only by the hind leg.” Lincoln’s
observation applies to our current understanding of
the legal culture of the Midwest...

Politics

The existence of the Midwest as a political region in
American politics is widely assumed. A Lexis-Nexis
search of major newspapers for the six months from
October 2003 through March 2004, for example, reveals
almost three hundred news stories explicitly linking
the region with the 2004 presidential election. But
to what extent is the Midwest...

Military Affairs

Throughout its history the Midwest has been at the
fringe of conflicts fought elsewhere. Military operations
on its soil have been minor compared to those at
the centers of combat. Nonetheless, important actions
have been joined here, especially during Native American
prehistory, the European quests for empire in the
region, and wars between...

Welcome to Project MUSE

Use the simple Search box at the top of the page or the Advanced Search linked from the top of the page to find book and journal content. Refine results with the filtering options on the left side of the Advanced Search page or on your search results page. Click the Browse box to see a selection of books and journals by: Research Area, Titles A-Z, Publisher, Books only, or Journals only.